Mohammed Bello Doka’s piece calls on Nigerians to “avenge” Nasir El-Rufai’s treatment with their 2027 votes and paints him as a lion merely locked away for refusing to kneel. The metaphor is dramatic. The substance is thinner.
Is El-Rufai a Nigerian political lion, a national figure whose record transcends region, religion and personal ambition, or is he primarily an ethnic and religious political broker who has spent years trading on Northern and Muslim identity?
The evidence leans heavily toward the latter. In 2023 he backed the Muslim-Muslim ticket and the shift of power to the South after Buhari, not out of any long personal friendship with Bola Tinubu (whom he has since described as a man with whom he is “parallel lines that will never meet”), but because Islamic stakeholders in the Southwest asked for a Muslim candidate and because it fitted the North–South power-sharing arithmetic he had championed. That is brokerage, not statesmanship. Once the arithmetic no longer served him, once the ministerial nomination was blocked and the relationship cooled, the criticism began. A lion does not usually need to explain later that he was never really friends with the man whose emergence he helped facilitate.
If he were the formidable political lion the article claims, why was he so thoroughly outmanoeuvred by the very “Jagaban” he had helped install? He submitted himself to the ministerial process and was rejected. He has since faced investigation, arraignment and continued detention ordered or upheld by the courts. The ICPC has brought charges arising from the Kaduna State House of Assembly’s findings on loans, contracts and alleged financial irregularities during his tenure. Courts have dismissed his fundamental-rights suit against the anti-graft agencies and refused bail. That is not the portrait of an untouchable lion. It is the portrait of a politician whose influence proved insufficient against both institutional processes and a more calculating operator in power.
His record in Kaduna also sits uneasily with the image of a unifier or national lion. Accusations of deepening ethno-religious divisions, including the Muslim-Muslim ticket later explained in religious terms to clerics, comments diminishing the Southern Kaduna population, restrictions that critics said disproportionately affected Christian practices, and alleged payments to some Fulani groups, have followed him for years. He has denied being a religious bigot and insisted he applied the law equally. Many Southern Kaduna voices, the Christian Association of Nigeria in the North, and even the current Defence Minister have said otherwise. A man who governed a deeply divided state by leaning into its fault lines is not easily recast as a victim whose only crime was speaking truth to power.
Detention for nearly eight months is serious and should be scrutinised. Corruption allegations against a former governor should also be scrutinised. Framing the entire matter as a simple political hostage-taking by “paper tigers”, while ignoring court orders, assembly petitions and the man’s own polarising history, is selective. Nigerians can and should demand accountability from everyone, including those currently in power. They should not be asked to treat one former governor’s legal troubles as a sacred cause that overrides evidence, judicial process or the larger failures of ethnic and religious politics.
A caged man is still a man. Whether he was ever a lion, and whether his cage is the result of principle or of ordinary political and legal consequences, is a question the article declines to answer honestly. Voters in 2027 will decide what, if anything, they wish to avenge. They would do better to vote on governance, corruption, security and national cohesion than on the rehabilitation of any single politician’s image.
By John James
- Trump Calls for Ilhan Omar’s Immediate Resignation Over Name Claims in Court Filing
- EL-Rufai: A caged lion is still a lion, A Rebuttal
- Investigation Links Nearly 271 Million US Dollars of American Property to Nigerian Officials
- A Caged Lion is Still a Lion: Avenge El-Rufai’s Treatment With Your Votes, By Mohammed Bello Doka
- UK Home Office Confirms Largest Recent Deportation Flight Carrying 44 Nigerians and Ghanaians
